Marin Center’s disrepair prompts planning for major upgrades

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Gabriella Calicchio, Marin County’s director of cultural and visitor services, and Tony Taubert, a county technical coordinator, pass the decaying atrium at Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium in San Rafael on Monday. The atrium floor has dropped six inches.
(Robert Tong/Marin Independent Journal)

The sign along Highway 101 that advertises events at the Marin Center in San Rafael is broken and must be replaced. (Robert Tong/Marin Independent Journal)

Water damage mars the ceiling in the green room at the Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium in San Rafael. The cultural complex needs more than $20 million in maintenance and upgrades, according to an assessment for the county. (Robert Tong/Marin Independent Journal)

Drivers passing by the Civic Center on Highway 101 won’t see advertisements for the Marin County Fair this year because the county’s electronic reader board is broken and must be replaced.

Gabriella Calicchio, the county’s director of cultural and visitor services, said the reader board’s untimely demise is indicative of the state of disrepair that plagues much of the county’s cultural facilities. Calicchio said the facilities — the Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, Exhibit Hall, Showcase Theater, concessions and county fairgrounds — are suffering from decades of deferred maintenance, and efforts are just beginning to design a plan for coming up with the needed money.

The hope is that the new plan will be more successful than the Marin Center Renaissance Partnership project, a public-private plan for renovating and expanding the Marin Center in the early 2000s that fizzled.

“Even in the early 2000s, citizens of our county knew that our facilities were falling apart. Here we are over 10 years later and it is a do-or-die situation,” Calicchio told supervisors during a budget workshop last week.

An assessment of Marin Center facilities, commissioned by the county last year, found a need for $2.5 million in immediate upgrades and another $23 million in maintenance and upgrades that will need to be completed within the next five years.

The county has set aside about $1 million for Marin Center maintenance this year, said Patrick Zuroske, Marin County’s facilities planning and development manager. Zuroske said he thinks that will be enough, however, because county public works employees have done some work on two emergency generators that will extend the equipment by five to 10 years and already replaced fire alarm systems, which were included in the facility assessment estimate.

Much of the infrastructure work that needs to be done goes unnoticed by the casual observer, but Calicchio said there are plenty of eyesores.

“The carpets are a mess,” she said. “They’re ripped and torn and covered with tape to prevent tripping hazards.”

Calicchio said both Veterans Memorial Auditorium and the Exhibit Hall have leaky roofs.

“The green room practically has a hole in its ceiling,” Calicchio said.

‘Disgusting’

“My biggest pet peeve aesthetically is the bathrooms,” she said. “Quite frankly, they’re disgusting, and they lack both air conditioning and heat.

“We can talk about changing our rental policies and fee structures all we want, but I can’t attract people to use a space that looks and feels like this one does.”

Not included in the facilities assessment is the need to upgrade Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium’s stage equipment.

“Most of the stage equipment has not been replaced since the early 1990s,” Calicchio said. “Many of our larger acts have to rent their own sound system and bring it in to do a show here.”

Calicchio said it will take about 12 weeks to replace the reader board, which was last switched out in 2004. She has noticed a drop in ticket sales since the board stopped working several weeks ago and she worries about the effect its absence will have on attendance at the Marin County Fair, which begins at the end of June.

Last summer, the air conditioning in Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium malfunctioned during the fair, two weeks before Diana Ross was scheduled to appear there.

Department of Public Works employees were able to keep the air conditioning system working, but Calicchio worries that some essential piece of Marin Center’s infrastructure will fail at a critical moment.

“Any of those major equipment pieces are at the very end of their useful life,” she said.

Looking ahead

Calicchio is methodically laying the groundwork to attack the problem. By the end of this year, she hopes to have completed a three- to five-year strategic plan for the county’s Department of Cultural Services.

Using that plan, Calicchio hopes by 2018 to create both a countywide art and culture plan and a timeline for a master plan to address facility needs. She sees the need to develop a base of consistent local donors to the arts. Ultimately, she would like to see some kind of funding measure placed on the ballot to create a dedicated revenue stream for the arts in Marin.

In the early 2000s, members of the Marin Center Renaissance Partnership, the public-private endeavor, envisioned a $140 million expansion and renovation of the Marin Center. The recommended project included improving the acoustics and expanding the lobby and atrium of Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium.

The project raised about $400,000 in private contributions, but it never got off the ground despite the county paying more than $500,000 to consultants for public opinion surveys, fundraising planning and design work.

The Renaissance Partnership was seeking private donations for Marin Center close to the time that the Great Recession hit, but bad timing wasn’t the only problem the project faced, said former San Rafael mayor Al Boro, who assisted in the fundraising drive.

“I also think the price tag on that project was huge,” Boro said. “There just wasn’t much of an appetite to support it.”

Supervisor Judy Arnold said, “There wasn’t a clear plan for fundraising. If you’re going to go out for a capital campaign, it’s like planning a military assault. Nobody there knew how to do that so it just languished.”

Arnold said she thinks Calicchio has the skills to avoid past mistakes.

“She understands what fundraising and development means,” Arnold said. “If anyone can get it done, she can.”